Eileen traces her family history of how work serves as a function for survival and an act of love. She takes on the work of a tombstone maker. By making her own tombstone, she puts her filmmaker identity to death.

A Viddsee Original Production

Director Statement: How does one define essentialism? What type of work is essential to Singapore’s society? Essentialism has been a controversial topic since the beginning, and it is no different, when The Straits Time pushed out an article “essential, or not” - Singapore thinks that artists are not essential to society especially in the time of a pandemic.

I look at the knee jerk, triggered reactions of artists, and I ask myself why are people upset? I ask myself, do I feel that way? Does our work define our sense of self-worth? Then I realised people may have associated the idea of being essential to the idea of being important. No one likes to think that what they do, is not important to society. To explore this further, I feel like I have to question my own relationship with my work - filmmaking.

Reductive thinking is dangerous, that’s where we experience inequality. Our inability to appreciate the nature of each job, to over categorise, is what creates a divide in society. After all, every job is created by man to fill a gap and to solve a problem or enhance society. In Your Shoes, essentially, is my way of exploring the connection and perception of work beyond filmmaking.

All jobs have it's identity and function, it’s not about what is essential. The real question begs - what is our relationship with our work?